Stories for "Art"

This post first appeared at BillMoyers.com. In the summer of 2014, one of the world’s top nature photographers was on an expedition in the far north to document the changing Arctic. Paul Nicklen was sailing around Svalbard, an archipelago halfway between Scandinavia and the North Pole. The largely uninhabited land sees 24 hours of sunlight […]

Photographer Angélica Dass captures some of humanity’s truest colors through her portrait project Humanae, a catalogue of human skin color displayed as a simple, captivating collage of Pantone portraits that reflects the deepest shades of brown and black, to the lighter tones of white, pink and everything in between. For Dass, Humanae is more than […]

A Sudanese high jumper towers over Rio de Janeiro, arching over a 25-story building in the Flamengo district. A triathlete plows through the waters of Botafogo Bay, mid-stroke, her wingspan as wide as a city bus, while a giant diver shows us the soles of his feet as he leaps from the stone jetty in Barra da Tijuca. […]

The image itself looks laid back enough — a 20-year-old man in a hoodie and jeans, walking through New York City. Except that this image is 150 feet tall and pasted on a plaza near the Flatiron Building. Cabs and cars flow around him while pedestrians scamper past. This image, created by TED Prize winner JR, […]

Alexandre Farto spends his days creating towering works on the buildings of Lisbon and London — portraits of people that mirror urban decay, dissolving into scratches and splatters. Their stretched-out visages gaze over these cities with solemn, elegant omniscience. Meanwhile, Shai Dahan adorns walls, facades and barriers in Gothenburg and Borås with colorful odes to […]

On the surface, the talk is “TED-like”: the round red carpet, the well-rehearsed speaker, the shadowy audience, the headset mic. But quickly, discordant elements begin to register: the strange parenthetical markings on the floor, the inappropriate audience responses, the fact that the speaker himself is a 10-year-old boy. Welcome to “The Thought Leader,” a satire […]

More than a million people took to the streets of Paris yesterday to show solidarity against extremism and terrorism. And their eyes were on the eyes of Stéphane Charbonnier, the editor of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, who was killed in his office last week in a terrorist attack, along with 12 others. These eyes […]

. Artist Julie Freeman creates kinetic sculptures, compositions and animations from nature-generated data. Think: the motion of fish swimming, or the quiver of moths’ wings. This week, Freeman revealed a new piece of work from the TED Fellows stage. Called “We Need Us,” it’s an online, data-driven artwork that explores the nature of metadata. It’s now […]

Jean-Baptiste Michel has sold a small sculpture to the Whitney Museum of American Art. A major museum acquiring a piece—that’s a big moment for any artist. But this sculpture is the very first piece of art Michel ever created. Michel is the data researcher who showed what you can learn using Google’s Ngram Viewer at TEDxBoston in […]

This portrait of a girl tells a story larger than the massive piece of vinyl it is printed on. Unfurled in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa region of Pakistan, “#NotABugSplat” was created by a collection of artists and activists, using TED Prize winner JR’s Inside Out campaign, to send a message to drone operators, who reportedly call their kills “bug splats” because they […]

“It looks like it’s holding up the clouds.” “It’s like a sky jellyfish.” “I love how the light moves across it along with the sound.” These were some of the comments heard at TED2014 about Skies Painted with Unnumbered Sparks, a collaboration between sculptor Janet Echelman and data artist Aaron Koblin. This monumental sculpture stretched […]

When TED Fellow Gabriel Barcia-Colombo saw an extraction of strawberry DNA for the first time, he was smitten. “I’d never thought about DNA being a beautiful thing before I saw it in this form,” he says in today’s talk, given at the TED Fellows Retreat. Barcia-Colombo was inspired to join the public biotech lab Genspace, […]

Janet Echelman is installing her new sculpture as we speak. Not in a gallery or on a pedestal, but instead soaring over the middle of downtown Vancouver. The installation involves cranes, hard hats and anchor points engineered atop two buildings: a 24-story hotel and the Vancouver Convention Centre where TED2014 will be held. “After three […]

Aparna Rao makes the kind of art that makes you go “awwwwww,” even if you are the kind of person who would never make such a noise. In today’s talk, this TED Fellow shows us a gallery of art that goes a little crazy when no one is looking, but snaps to attention when someone walks […]

Artist JR’s latest project turns the floor of the David H. Koch Theater, home of the New York City Ballet, into a swirl of bodies. For it, JR photographed the company’s dancers and assembled their portraits into a 6,500-square-foot mural that stretches the length of the lobby. Walking on the floor is surreal, as each […]